Welcome

Welcome to my ever-evolving blog. It started out as a blog on Beachbody workouts and products, mainly when I was a Beachbody coach. I no longer coach, not because I don't believe in Beachbody's programs (I subscribe to Beachbody on Demand and use their workouts every day), I am just not a salesperson and hated that aspect of it. I am more than willing to answer questions about my experiences with their products and the various workouts, and I feel freer to do so without the appearance of giving a biased review of something.

I have also started adding reviews for various things I have purchased like movies, books, CDs, and other products. This was brought about by a fight with Amazon in which all of my reviews were removed over a completely bullshit allegation that I posted a review that violated their terms of service. After going back and forth with the morons in the community-reviews department (even after they admitted that my posts did not violate their guidelines) they restored my account (which took them six months to do), but I have been posting my reviews on my blog to have them preserved in case something like that happens again. And here, I will post uncensored reviews so I will swear from time to time and post reviews that may be longer than Amazon's character limit. Everything I post here on any topic or product is my personal opinion, and I take no compensation for any product reviews I post. I am a member of Amazon's vine program and because I get those products for free, I keep those reviews on Amazon only, but everything I have purchased with my own money, whether from Amazon or some other store/website/outlet, I will post here.  

I also plan to do some longer blog posts on various topics, such as how to learn physics, how to get through calculus, and longer reviews of workout programs as I do them. Basically, whatever strikes me as interesting at the time.  As you can see if you navigate around the blog, I had many years in between postings. During that time I was going back to school to get an engineering degree, and learning material that I avoided my first time through college was a different experience and one that gave me a lot of insight into how to do well in those classes, which I will try to impart here for those who are looking to get a science or engineering degree. 

Monday, August 15, 2022

Textbook Review: Signal Processing First 1st Edition

 


This is a book that is used as a part of some electrical engineering curriculums for classes such as signals and systems or signal processing. Generally, I would say that it gives decent explanations of the introductory material, but it is very light on helpful examples and thus the problem sets can be very hard (if your professor assigns them versus making up his or her own problems). It does a bit of the review of the math you should already have been exposed to many times over in the first couple of chapters and then gets into the new material. Several of the exercises in the book are keyed to MATLAB, which some professors use more extensively than others. In terms of doing actual problems, the MATLAB material in the book is probably the most helpful. But, the book does follow the pattern that far too many math, science, and engineering textbooks do, in that they explain and give examples for the very basic material and then have problem sets with material that is much harder and sometimes impossible to figure out based on what you have read. Personally, I think that is fine if you are in a Master's level class as those should prepare you for real-world engineering problems that you have to figure out and will not have the ability to look up. However, at the undergraduate level when you are learning the introductory concepts, the problem sets should be representative of the explanatory material so that if you have read the chapter text, you should be able to figure out the vast majority of the problems. So, overall, I do not think it is the worst textbook out there, but it could be a lot better.



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